() — Nearly four months after OpenAI took the tech industry by storm with ChatGPT, the company will release the next-generation version of its technology that powers the viral chatbot tool.
In a blog post this Tuesday, OpenAI presented GPT-4, which the company says is capable of performing well on a variety of standardized tests and is also less likely to “get off the rails” with its answers, as some users have previously experienced.
OpenAI said the updated technology passed a mock law graduation exam with scores in the top 10% of the students who took the test; by contrast, the previous version, GPT-3.5, scored around the bottom 10%. GPT-4 can also read, parse or generate up to 25,000 words of text, and write code in all major programming languages, according to the company.
OpenAI described the update as the “latest milestone” for the company. Although it is still “less capable” than humans in many real-world scenarios, it exhibits “human-level performance in various professional and academic benchmarks,” according to the company.
GPT-4 is the latest version of the OpenAI language model, which is trained on large amounts of online data to generate compelling responses to user prompts. The updated version, which is now available via a waiting list, is already finding its way into some third-party products, including Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing.
“We’re happy to confirm that the new Bing is running on GPT-4, which we’ve customized for search,” Microsoft said this Tuesday. “If you’ve used the new Bing preview at any time in the last five weeks, you’ve already experienced an early version of this powerful model.”
While ChatGPT has impressed many users with its ability to generate original essays, stories, and song lyrics in response to user prompts since its launch in November 2022, it has also raised some concerns. AI chatbots, including tools from Microsoft and Google, have come under fire in recent weeks for being emotionally reactive, making factual errors and engaging in outright “hallucinations,” as the industry calls it.
GPT-4 has similar limitations to previous GPT models. “It’s still buggy, it’s still limited, and it still looks more impressive on first use than after spending more time with it,” Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, wrote in a series of tweets on Tuesday announcing the update.
But there are notable improvements, he said. “It’s more creative than previous models, hallucinating significantly less, and less biased”wrote.
Still, the company said, “great care should be taken when using language model results, particularly in high-risk contexts.”
The news comes two weeks after OpenAI announced that it is opening up access to its ChatGPT tool to third-party companies, paving the way for the chatbot to be integrated into numerous applications and services.
Instacart, Snap and the tutor app Quizlet are among the first partners to experiment with the tool. In January, Microsoft confirmed that it is making a “multi-billion dollar” investment in OpenAI and has since implemented the technology in some of its products, including its Bing search engine.
